1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for transmitting notification to an Input/Output (I/O) device of an event at an originating device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most printers today implement a sleep mode where the printer halts the supply of power to various system components. For instance, during sleep mode in a laser printer, the printer may shut down the laser, a mirror engine that moves mirrors that direct the laser beam, a drum that is charged by the laser to attract the toner that is applied to the paper, and a fuser which is heated to pressure and heat seal the print onto the paper. Sleep mode helps increase the longevity of the printer components by reducing the wear and tear on moving parts, reduces the noise of the parts, and reduces energy consumption during periods when the printer is not used.
Printer performance is adversely impacted by the sleep mode because printing may be delayed while the printer has to activate, including power-up, the components lying dormant in sleep mode. In fact, the time to print the first page of a print job is gated by the time to rasterize the data into a bitmap and the time to activate all the components lying dormant in sleep mode, which is longer. Moreover, the time to activate the components may be many times longer than the time to rasterize the data. The printer may receive print job data from an attached computer or from a server that receives print jobs from several attached computers. Many printers in the prior art begin to power-up dormant components in sleep mode upon receiving the first page of data from the spooler.
Printer manufacturers are constantly attempting to improve printer performance to obtain marketing advantages. The time from when the print job is submitted to when the printer stacks the first page of the print job is one popular performance measurement commonly used to judge printer performance. This performance measurement is adversely affected if the print job is large and/or complex because the spooling process to rasterize and buffer the print data takes longer. Further, the technique used by the system submitting the print data can also significantly affect printer performance. The time to print the first page will increase if the system is configured to spool the entire print job before submitting any data to the printer as opposed to submitting data from the spooler before all data is spooled.
For these reasons, there is a continued need in the art to improve printer performance and reduce the time needed to start printing from when the print job was submitted by the application.